It’s a bit shocking to me when I see people online putting 9/11 conspiracies in the same box as “MAGA” conspiracies (for lack of a better term, sorry).
For reference, I was 24 in 2001 living in central NJ. Even without social media or fake news websites or what cable news has become today, I have vivid memories of people having the firm belief that there was something up with the attack on 9/11. Was this just my social circle?
Jet fuel melting steel beams was one of the more fringe and unfounded (and quickly debunked) ideas but the rest of everything on that day was questionable. Tower seven falling, the missing plane debris at the pentagon and central PA, the military / president not responding to known threats, if a person with limited flight time could hit a tower, the fact that Bush attacked a country that had nothing to do with the event, and so much more are still, I thought, reasonable questions - especially when looked at together.
This is not about rehashing each theory. Or maybe it is? Have I missed that everything has been debunked?
I mean, I still believe 9/11 was an inside job or at least high level officials, including Bush, were aware it was going to happen and did nothing to stop it. I thought this was still a common opinion of most or many Americans over the age of forty.
Aren’t we lucky to be living in the age of human history in which governments are good and honest? Not like those old, backwards governments in history books who would dress up their soldiers as the enemy’s and order them to do something heinous.
“It’s in the Bible”, is what my boss at one time believed.
I started there a few years after the events and wondered why this guy kept a 9/12 newspaper front page on display. I thought it was in poor taste but so be it. Eventually the topic came up and he started spitting out bible quotes to explain it all clear as day. He also laughed at dinosaurs!
Sadly, enough of the others there were bible toters too and did not disagree. I moved on before the Trump and covid fun began but I’m sure it was nuts.
That office changed me to my core. Seeing people living so deep in their own fantasy world that they would apply those fantasies to real world events was truly depressing.
These were professional engineers. Not kooks. My time there made me lose any respect for religion. Fanatics and conspiracy theorists are all attention seeking story tellers in need of gullible listeners.
From my understanding it’s pretty widely known that most intelligence agencies though something could happen but not the specifics, and chose not to act on that information or communicate with one another.
The exact reasons aren’t known obviously. My gut tells me incompetence/apathy from government agencies. That’s not a very cinematic or compelling answer, though, and I think a lot of people look for more interesting narratives.
Whenever a big tragedy like 9/11 happens, people tend to try and look for the Chekhov’s gun that shows a deeper meaning or dramatic orchestration. That’s just not real life though.
I still believe 9/11 was an inside job or at least high level officials, including Bush, were aware it was going to happen
Crazy talk. This was absolutely not a widely held opinion.
not in my circles. Certainly taken advantage of big time though with bad laws.
I was 31 when the attacks happened.
While I do think that there was an awareness that an attack was possible, or even in the works. I sincerely doubt that anyone truly thought that 3 airplanes were going to be flown into buildings on that day and one crash in a PA field. The US had the attitude that we were isolated and well defended enough that such attacks were unthinkable. The complete one sidedness of Gulf War 1 really gave the US an out of proportion notion of being invulnerable. Even though the WTC was bombed 9 years prior, two years after the end of GW1.
Conspiracy denotes malicious intelligent intent. The reality is closer to stupidly complacent. Sometimes the two are hardly indistinguishable.
The only thing I remember people being remotely close to believing was that Bush was so incompetent that he allowed a terrorist attack to happen.
It’s not really a theory that Bush was an incompetent fuckwit, but it’s highly debatable if they knew enough to stop it.
highly debatable if they knew enough to stop it.
Well, the theory that was floated at the time was that they didn’t want to stop it. The very fringe suggested it was entirely planned by the US. They (Bush et al) knew this would provoke our military and provide an excuse to attack the Middle East. To finish was Bush senior didn’t.
Again, I don’t really want to get down a rabbit hole of validating theories. I want to know if others recall this being a national conversation or if it was just the hundreds of people I knew and news outlets I was watching.
In my mind, it’s not that the intelligence community had indisputable evidence that said “these people are going to hijack these plans at this time and simultaneously crash them into these buildings”…but moreso “there is chatter about an upcoming attack involving hijacked planes” but they didn’t have enough to act on it.
Now…with that part said, I 100% fully agree that this attack was used as a blank-check excuse to invade the Middle East carte clanche.
I definitely remember some people screeing about Bush and Cheney wanting it, but IIRC, everyone was treating it like suspicion at most.
The Epstein conspiracy theory was accepted FAR more readily, but then that’s basically guaranteed to be true to some degree, even if it was truly just the jailors being incompetent fuckwits that wanted to take justice in to their own hands.
A lot of people made fun of those theories and sarcastically pretended to believe in them. Maybe that’s what you remember. Our human memories are not very reliable.
The conspiracy is that the Saudi’s funded it and the families of 9/11 are still going after them so I guess it’s not a conspiracy. The stuff they found was pretty fucked up and deserves more investigation. Remember Bush protected Saudis and outed CIA agents probably to protect his obvious incompetence.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/11/us/9-11-families-saudi-arabia-lawsuit/index.html
As I mention above, the central power in SA needs us to keep other regional powers at check and the Wahhabi in power.
Even if government officials where involved on the attacks, that would be against the direct interests of the Saudi Crown.
In all cases, 9/11 was stated by the perpetrators to be used as an attempt to take the US out of SA (sacred land for Muslims) and every one had allegiances with either the Muslim Brotherhood (and through it Iran), Al Qaeda or, like in Bin Laden’s case, both.
This guy though fell from grace and started his campaign against the US during the Iraqi invasion, when the king and government decided that his plan of fighting with faith wasn’t as sensible as US tanks and planes.
In fact he tried to convince the Saudi scholars to issue a fatwa against the US deployment, but they preferred to keep their necks.
What I’m trying to say is, the SA government is a cruel, despotic and brutal regime but had little to no benefit from aiding in 9/11. Did they fuck up? I guess royally so, but I don’t see why would bite our hand.
Then again, I know nothing…
so I guess it’s not a conspiracy.
It’s not a theory* it is a conspiracy.
For the first few weeks, everybody wanted answers, and when people don’t get answers, we make them up.
I remember hearing and seriously considering nearly all of the theories you mentioned, but as we started to get more answers, most people just forgot about, or stopped listening to the conspiracies.
Unless, of course, you were DEDICATED to one of the conspiracies, and surrounded yourself with like minded people who dismissed any evidence that went against their beliefs. Much like MAGA when you mention all the evidence that Trump lost the last election, or committed over 34 felonies.
most people just forgot about, or stopped listening to the conspiracies.
This is what I think happened. People just stopped caring and defaulted back to “trusting the government” or were distracted by other things like the war in Afghanistan and the 2008 financial crisis.
In my mind, these theories were still prevalent for at least a few years after the attacks. And now, 20 years later, people forgot so much that they’ve accepted that only weirdo internet trolls believe in these fringe theories.
The only conspiracy that I or people I know may have given credence to is the idea that people high up in the House of Saud knew about, condoned and/or funded the attacks.
And there’s actual evidence that it’s not just a theory.
It wasn’t most people, but there were a lot.
There is some evidence to suggest that the Saudis were involved in setting it up. Beyond that, there were endless conspiracy theories, none of which were widely believed. I’ve talked about it with a lot of people over the years and have yet to meet a single conspiracy theorist. The vast majority have never believed in a 9/11 conspiracy.
Whom in the Saudis wanted to take such a risk? I mean the Wahhabi needs us to keep the cash and weapon flow going if they want to keep in check their rivals.
I’m not disagreeing, just want to understand their motivations.
After all, Bin Laden was not Wahhabi at all, at odds with the Royal Family and had an upbringing at Muslim Brotherhood camps, which at the end of the day are managed by Iran, one of the main powers in the region and the biggest threat to SA.
In that regard, intentionally or not, Bin Laden strategy would weaken SA, which fits with what the Brotherhood wanted and ultimately fits with Iran’s regional objectives. But I can’t see how someone in power would want that unless they had pretensions to the crown, or rather following the Iranian philosophy, a possible republic’s government.
Not some evidence, clear and convincing evidence.
The problem is that the “Saudi” government is literally composed of competing factions of slave owning inbred cousins.
So saying the Saudi government was involved isn’t as clear cut as it sounds for the proposes of adjudicating any “punishment”.
Now, if KSA wasn’t the lynchpin of America’s Middle Eastern security apparatus, and viewed as integral to the entire American imperial project, then the US Security State’s response would have likely been much different.
I’ve talked about it with a lot of people over the years and have yet to meet a single conspiracy theorist.
These theories were floated, with legitimacy, on local and national news, at the time. Not in the sense of, “it’s theorized that there were antifa plants at Jan 6” but “look here at this video and you could see how some implosion experts are saying this is the pattern for a scheduled building collapse”. They were interviewing people in manhattan who had concerns about a government coverup.
At the time, the regular news (before it got ridiculous) was pulling together all these theories and presenting them together. It was overwhelming that there was much more to this event. And it seems to have all been forgotten.
Everyone who is aware of the facts agrees that the big terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were the result of a conspiracy. That the American president was in on it seems unlikely. Some of your “reasonable” questions seem ridiculous, such as the idea that a person having “limited flight time” makes any difference at all. The invasion of Iraq was the result of another conspiracy, one which was ongoing at the time and ready to use any convenient excuse to get started.
not at all your imagination, most of the stuff you listed is established fact.
A lot of people don’t believe in “conspiracies” unless they already “know” that the conspiracy is true, in which case they believe it was never a “conspiracy”, even though something like 9/11 was obviously a secret plan that a small group plotted to cause harm.
